Seattle City Council Public Safety & Human Services Committee 9/27/22

Good morning, the September 27th meeting of the Public Safety and Human Services Committee will come to order.

It is 9.01 a.m.

I'm Lisa Herbold, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Mosqueda.

Council Member Nelson.

Present.

Council Member Peterson.

Present.

Vice Chair Lewis.

Present.

Chair Herbold.

Here.

or present.

Thank you so much.

So on today's agenda, we're going to hear four appointments to the Pacific Hospital PDA.

We'll hear a brief presentation from the city attorney's office on an update to the criminal code, harmonizing the criminal code with state legislative changes.

We'll also be hearing a brief presentation from Presiding Judge Eisenberg on a municipal court grant.

And we're going to be joined after that with workers from Drive Forward and Working Washington regarding their experiences with platform deactivations and background checks.

And this is the next part of the discussion around pay up.

And then we'll hear from the city attorney's office, the criminal division to present their second quarter report.

And then lastly, we'll finish up the meeting with a briefing from SPD on their risk managed demand analysis.

We're going to stop at 11.30 a.m.

to allow council members to attend the mayor's budget speech at noon.

So with that, move on to approving our agenda for today's committee meeting.

If there's no objection today, agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

At this time, we'll move into public comment.

I will moderate the public comment period in the following manner.

Each speaker will get two minutes to speak.

We will hear both from virtual and in-person public commenters.

I will call on each speaker by name and in the order in which they registered on the Council's website and in the in-person sign-in form.

If you've not registered to speak yet, but you'd like to do so, you can sign up before the end of the public comment session.

Once I call a speaker's name, if you're using the virtual option, you'll hear a prompt.

And once you've heard that prompt, you will need to press star six to unmute yourself.

Please begin by stating your name and the item which you are addressing.

Speakers will hear a chime when 10 seconds are left of the allotted time.

And once the speaker hears the chime, we ask that you begin to wrap up your public comments.

If speakers do not end their comments at the end of the allotted time provided, the speaker's mic will be muted after 10 seconds to allow us to hear from the next speaker.

Once you've completed your public comment, we ask that you please disconnect from the line If you plan to continue following the meeting, we ask that you do so via the Seattle channel or the listening options listed on our agenda.

Clerk, can you please give me the sign-up sheet?

Thank you so much.

All right, we've got four people signed in for public comment, one in person and three online.

So we will start with the in-person public speaker, Alex Zimmerman.

Well, Zeke Heil, Emerald, Flower, Goodwill, them Nazi Gestapo bandito and psychopath who live in this city, and exactly in this council chamber, who speak to us from the heaven.

I even spoke about agenda number eight, about report from attorney office criminal division crime to the roof it's nothing surprise me you know what this mean i live here for 35 years what is surprise me why we not arrest ever citizen arrest council what is doing here because we don't have COVID right now, we don't have nothing right now, we don't have flu right now, and everything staying closer and never show us faces.

When you stop enacting like a criminal, like a bandit in broken law, why city attorney don't prosecute you?

I don't understand this.

Where this will be stopping?

Why?

Three year enough ever president idiot talk about this.

I mean president, both president idiot.

It's not a point.

What is talking is no more COVID.

So this crime, what is you doing, Consul?

It's a pure crime.

What is this?

It's a crime.

Why you don't bring back normal what is we have before?

Why you doing this so differently, huh?

Can you explain to me?

Why?

Three years, enough.

Come back to America, to normal, to city code.

It's exactly what it's supposed to be.

You're supposed to be all here.

Stopping this and give us a chance to speak and see our faces.

Because you're not only racist with Nazi Gestapo principle, you are a real bandit, you are a criminal.

I told about this for last five months and talk, why you don't show us faces?

Black, white, yellow, strips, we all identical now.

It's pure racism, pure criminals is exactly what they're talking.

Stand up Seattle freaking 750,000 idiot.

Our next speaker is BJ Last and BJ will be followed by David Haynes.

My name is BJ Last, a Ballard resident small business owner.

I'm calling to correct the record on the National Institute of Criminal Justice Reforms analysis since SPD and members of this have misstated Nick Jr.' 's methodology.

So first off, like Nick Jr. is a group with deep ties to law enforcement, both being led by people who have worked in the criminal justice system and partnering with current cops on this project.

This is hardly a radical group.

Its analysis was based on three specific items, the final call disposition, so how SPD closed out the call, arrest rates, and a qualitative assessment of whether specific call type would benefit from alternative call response.

This combination of three factors is how Nick Jr. ended up recommending some non-criminal calls receive SPD-based approaches.

And SPD signed off on this methodology before Nick Jr. ever even began its analysis.

SPD didn't start denigrating Nick Jr. as overly simplistic and irresponsible until SPD saw the results and the amount of calls and corresponding budget Nick Jr. recommended transferring to community response.

SPD had so many objections to Nick Jr.' 's proposed methodology.

Why did the SPD contract Nick Jr. for this analysis in the first place?

The risk-managed framework is designed to continue disparate impacts of policing on BIPOC community members by attempting to use totality of circumstances, including location, in certain words a caller uses to assign a SPD or non-police-based response instead of assigning discrete call types to SPD or alternative responses.

The RMD report acknowledges perpetuating inequalities is something a system like this will do on page seven before magically claiming that two minor steps will entirely mitigate this.

This cannot be mitigated away because RMD is reactively making decisions based on historic SPD data.

And SPD's historic data is racist as evidenced by SPD stopping, searching, and arresting by BIPOC community members at disproportionate rates.

How the system that is designed to send non-police response.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is David Haynes and David will be followed by Peter Condit.

David, are you with us?

Thank you, David Haynes, living on Duwamish land, bearing witness to evil, destroying and undermining Chief Seattle's trades for peace and expectations for his people and their friends, did not a proper civilized first world quality of life.

It's impossible to live in a civilized society when the elected officials make laws to protect crack, meth, heroin, and fentanyl drug pushers from jail, as long as they have less than 3.5 grams on them.

Yet that's exactly what City Hall has done.

It's easy to predict a prolific amount of property crimes and sex crimes that are directly correlated and rooted in city council, the mayor, the police chief, and prosecutor's office going out of their way to protect criminals, black and brown drug pushers, and all the rest, to appease a handful of organizers and devil's advocates who've taken over the agenda to upend a majority for a deplority of a minority allowed to conduct uncivil war on community with impunity.

Your job is a volunteer service, yet you and your staff don't have the best interest of community at large.

You're purposely undermining society and continue down this destructive path to appease a bunch of scorned organizers, activists, and devil's advocates from King County Equity Now, decriminalized Seattle, and other newly created nonprofits hiding rioters and arsonists from George Floyd protesters who pocket tax money in a trade for not protesting you and helping with some of your election apparatus.

Yet you continue to chase victims of crime with more profitable wraparound services using tax money pocketed by some of the same nonprofits to expand your political support who are unqualified to solve a problem that originates with exempting drug pushers from jail.

Even the racist woke police chief is on record as claiming he's using his leadership to make it up to the black and brown community for past wrongs by simply not policing properly.

The police chief literally has only like six years of crime.

Our last speaker is Peter Condit.

Peter.

Hello, good morning.

This is Peter Condit, a small business owner in District 6. Council is being presented today with a risk management analysis that was contracted by the Seattle Police Department.

The RMD analysis attempts to quantify the risks posed to first responders by community members, but it completely ignores the real risks of injury and death that police responders pose to community members, such as Charlene Lyles, John T. Williams, and Sean Fiorina's child.

The RMD analysis was initiated because SPD was unhappy with the results of the Nick Jr. report.

SPD made it publicly known publicly that they thought more call types should remain in their jurisdiction.

In this light, the RMD analysis they contracted cannot be considered independent.

The RMD consultant is literally being paid to deliver results in line with the cops' demands.

For its part, the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, NICJR, does not lack police officer perspectives.

NICJR is headed by David Muhammad, who has worked in the criminal legal system and in police departments.

For the Seattle analysis, Nick Jr. also partnered with Captain Ursi Joyner, a 27-year veteran of the Oakland Police Department.

The Nick Jr. report was based on three years of SBD call data.

Their methodology utilized the final call status of each event, arrest rate, and a qualitative assessment of whether specific call types would benefit from a non-police response.

SBD signed off on this methodology before Nick Jr. began its work.

Only after SBD saw the results did they claim it was inadequate.

In reality, SPD objects to the Nick Jr. findings because they threaten police power and resources.

The analysis found that 49% of SPD's calls should receive a community-based, non-police response.

Another 24% should receive a community-based response with SPD merely present.

To date, there has been no accountability for SPD's racist and violent behavior.

The flawed RMD analysis should not be used to limit the scope of what can be transferred out of SPD and into nonviolent organizations as outlined by the Nick Jr.

Report.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you.

And with that, we are concluding public comment.

Moving on to the next items on our agenda today, we will begin with the first item on today's agenda.

Clerk, can you please read the item into the record?

Items one through four?

Yes, please.

Appointment 02375, appointment of Paul Feldman as member of Pacific Hospital Preservation and Development Authority Governing Council for a term to December 31, 2024. And item number two, appointment 02376, appointment of Douglas L. Jackson Jr. as member of Pacific Hospital Preservation and Development Authority Governing Council for a term to December 31, 2024. Committee agenda item number three, appointment 02374, reappointment of Gloria Burton as member of Pacific Hospital Preservation and Development Authority Governing Council for a term to December 31, 2023. And agenda item number four, appointment 02377, reappointment of Robert D. Cook as member of Pacific Hospital Preservation and Development Authority Governing Council for a term to December 31, 2024.

Thank you so much.

So, two of these appointments are new appointments, two are reappointments, again, to the Pacific Hospital Preservation Development Authority Governing Council.

Joining us this morning is John Kim, Executive Director of the Pacific Hospital Preservation and Development Authority Governing Council.

Mr. Kim, do you mind introducing yourselves and saying a few words about the Governing Council?

with pleasure.

Good morning, Public Safety and Human Services Committee.

It is my pleasure, my honor, to be introducing the PHPDA candidates, actually GC members, for confirmation to this committee.

The Pacific Hospital PDA is a health equity organization We are seeking to eliminate the disparities in access to healthcare and other resources that residents of Seattle and King County need to live healthy lives.

And we are also seeking to eliminate the disparities in health outcomes that results from their inability to access those valuable resources.

We do this by stewarding an incredibly valuable and historic property on North Beacon Hill, the Pacific Tower campus.

And the stewardship includes development of the asset in ways that would also serve health equity, the health equity mission, but also preserve the beauty of the campus and to create that place as a strong and willing neighbor to those who live in the community surrounding us.

Thank you so much.

Really, really appreciate it.

Appreciate the willingness of the members of your governing council to serve.

And with that, I'd love to just hear a bit from Mr. Feldman.

I understand only one of our new appointments, Mr. Feldman, is able to attend this morning.

And perhaps, Mr. Kim, you might want to start us off by speaking to Mr. Feldman as the nomination, and then we'll hand it off to Mr. Feldman so we can hear from him.

I would be glad to make the introduction.

I believe Paul speaks for himself, and I'm looking forward to hearing his comments.

But I will just say that I've had the pleasure of serving with Paul as a strategic advisor to both the finance and the program committees of the Governing Council of PHPDA since I came on board as an executive director.

I can safely say that Paul's commitment to the organization and his generous contribution of time and effort have made the organization stronger and better for it.

He's always willing to lean in and to bring a perspective from the community that informs our work and our decisions.

And it is an honor to be presenting him as a potential GC member.

All right.

Thank you.

Take it away.

Good morning, committee, Chairman Herbold, members of the committee.

I am honored to be here and to be considered for membership in the Governing Council.

As John mentioned, I've been volunteering as a strategic advisor to one and now both of the committees since I think 2015, so it's been a minute.

There are many things to like about this opportunity and the organization and what we're able to do.

And I think if you were to look on our website and look at the grants that are out on the street now and the ones that we've been doing over the years, you'll see a number of themes, including that we look to innovate, to support innovation in the community, particularly in BIPOC communities.

And we look at opportunities for scaling.

So we are strategic.

And of course, I love that.

And I'm glad to be able to tell you that.

So thank you so much.

Fantastic.

Thank you so much.

Really have appreciated working with you, Paul, on things like the AMP project, the AIDS Memorial Pathway, and just am so impressed by your lifelong commitment to advocacy and policy, specifically in the area of HIV AIDS advocacy.

your depth and breadth of your commitment is well evidenced in the gifts that you've given to our community.

Thank you and thank you for your continued willingness to serve in this capacity as well.

Just wondering, I'm going to take a quick pause and look to see if anybody has any questions or comments before we move on.

Seeing none.

So we, of course, cannot hear from Mr. Jackson.

We do have the nomination of Douglas Jackson before us.

I'm wondering, Mr. Kim, do you mind speaking to Mr. Jackson's appointment nomination?

I believe he might have a statement to share with us.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

He indeed drafted a statement for me to read in his stead, and he apologizes for not being able to make this meeting.

So without further ado, quote, service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.

This quote from Shirley Chisholm is the credo that guides me and my desire to give back to the communities that have enriched my life.

Membership on the program committee of the Pacific Hospital Preservation Development Authority has been among the most fulfilling opportunities I've had to serve my King County community since moving to Washington in 1996 to become a member of the University of Washington's faculty.

Working and learning alongside the members of the Program Committee to advance the PHPDA's grant making through the Health Equity Fund since 2015 has been a wonderful and multifaceted gift to receive.

Whether it has been learning from the members of diverse King County communities who find themselves at the margins when it comes to accessing quality health care, or working with program committee peers who bring their variety of lived experiences to the PHPDA's grant making that elevates the work of communities and their innovative homegrown ideas for closing the gaps in healthcare quality and access they experience or amplifying the voices of communities with the greatest needs and innovative person centered solutions to advocacy.

The PHPDA program committee has provided me with a relevant outlet to provide purposeful service.

I believe that the opportunity to be a part of planning the PHPDA's long-term strategies and guiding its financial and programmatic processes as a member of the governing council is a logical progression to the type of upstream service that has great meaning for me.

I look forward to engaging with the PHPDA in this new capacity, while at the same time, continuing to work alongside community members as a member of the program committee to dismantle systems of injustice and to replace them with ones in which equity is at the center.

Douglas Jackson.

Thank you so much.

Send my regards that we were unable to hear from Mr. Jackson this morning.

If you would, thank you.

Since this is the last committee meeting, though, before budget season, we didn't want to delay the nomination until we could have him back in December.

So we are making this exception to our standard.

process.

Also, we have two appointments that are reappointments this morning.

One is Gloria Burton, originally nominated by the mayor, and the other is Robert Cook, originally nominated by the PHP PDA Governing Council.

Mr. Kim, could you speak to the reappointments of both Ms. Burton and Mr. Cook?

Absolutely.

I'll speak first to Gloria Burton.

Gloria is a longstanding member now of the Governing Council of PHPDA.

She brings a special perspective that is really informed by her work with the Latinx community, and especially with migrant workers.

And she has been a passionate supporter of our efforts to really do outreach in a way that gives life to equity.

And that is reaching people where they're at and when they're ready.

And really ensuring that we have that laser focus on those who are not in a position to advocate for themselves.

And this was especially key during the pandemic and when we needed to get information out to communities regarding testing and then vaccinations.

And she continues to be passionate about speaking for those who are unserved and underserved and is a valuable addition to the Governing Council of PHPDA.

With regards to Bob Cook, Bob is another one who has long served, first as a strategic advisor for many years to the Finance Committee, and then as a full member of the Governing Council.

He is currently the treasurer and the chair of the Finance Committee.

His skill and acumen and his attention to detail are critical part of our consideration of the many opportunities that arise before us to develop the campus and to really be maximizing the potential for a public resource to solve public issues.

It is with great pleasure that I present both Gloria and Bob for reappointment.

Fantastic.

Thank you so much.

Council members, colleagues, if there are questions that you might have of Mr. Kim, this would be a good time to ask them.

Otherwise, we will move on with the official vote.

I am not seeing any raised hands.

to vote on this slate of appointments.

I want to also recognize that Councilmember Mosqueda has joined us.

Good morning.

With that, Councilmembers, I move the committee recommends the confirmation of the appointments, 2374 through 2377. Is there a second?

not seeing any comments, again, just many thanks to the PDA for the work that they do and appreciation for your partnership, Mr. Kim, and the service of Mr. Feldman.

With that, will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Mosqueda.

Aye.

Council Member Nelson.

Aye.

Council Member Peterson.

Aye.

Vice Chair Lewis?

Yes.

Chair Herbold?

Yes.

Five in favor.

Thank you, the motion carries and the committee recommendation is that the appointments be confirmed and they will be sent to the October 4th City Council meeting.

Mr. Feldman, Mr. Kim, thank you so much for taking your time this morning to join us.

Thank you for your service to the community through the Pacific Hospital Preservation and Development Authority.

Have a good morning.

All right, will the clerk please read in agenda item number five.

Chair, I am not seeing Judge Eisenberg with us yet.

I wonder if we should move to item six.

Let's see here.

I think you're right.

Well, then in that case, do we have folks here for item six?

This is the question.

Mr. Green is in the lobby here.

I will try and admit you, Mr. Green.

Good morning.

We have folks with us for item six now.

Excellent.

Will you please read in agenda item six.

Committee agenda item six, an ordinance relating to crimes and punishment conforming the Seattle Municipal Code with changes in state law and making technical corrections, amending sections 925030, 925100, 12A02050, 12A02150, 12A06050, 12A02050, or four or five, excuse me, 12A.09.020, 12A.10.150, 12A.12.010, 12A.12.010, 12A.14.010, 12A.14.160, 12A.14.170, 12A.16.040, and 12A.16.080 of the Seattle Municipal Code, and adding new sections 12A.040.215, 12A.06.047, 12A.14.175, 12A.177, 12A.14.230, 12A.14.240 and 12A.

12.14.260 of the Seamus code and repealing sections 12A.06.120 and 12A.06.130, 12A.06.150, 12A.06.155, 12A.06.160, 12A.06.165, 12A.06.170, 12A.06.175, 12A.06.165, 12A.06.165, 12A.06.165, 12A.06.165, 12A.06.165, 12A.06.165, 12A.06.165, 12A.06.165, 12A.06.165, 12A.06.165, 12A.06.165, 12A.06.165, 12A.06.165, 12A.06.165, 12A.06.165, 12A.06.165, 12A.06.165, 12A.06.165, 12A.06 We are joined by Richard from the city attorney's office to present this item.

Thank you.

First of all, I apologize to the clerk for the long title.

Unlike our traffic ordinance, Seattle's criminal ordinances don't have to be the same as state law, except that when the ordinances and the state law prohibit the same conduct, the punishment has to be the same.

So largely that's much of what this ordinance does.

For instance, section two concerns certain penalties for animal control violations, talked about the probationary period, forfeiture of animals, prohibiting a person who's convicted of cruelty to animals from owning animals for certain periods of time, requires the person convicted of an animal control violation to pay animal control.

It costs, it's restitution costs in the case.

So section three concerns what the appropriate court would be in a case where, for instance, let's say a Seattle court orders a defendant not to have any contact with the victim, and the defendant then moves to California, and he sends text messages to the victim, but she gets them while she's on vacation somewhere.

And so we don't want to have a situation where the victim, in order to participate in a prosecution, has to go to California or to go to some other state.

But we can do that in Seattle if the person is a resident of Seattle.

So that's the purpose of that.

Sections 4, 6, and 7 rename the current crime of cyberstalking as cyber harassment and creates a new crime of cyberstalking, which concerns the use of an electronic tracking device to monitor a person.

Actually, we did have a report this summer of an incident involving that that we couldn't charge we had to send the report to the county.

So this is a this.

This is a crime that actually does seem to occur, perhaps more frequently these days with with the event with the biggest inquiry.

innovations in electronic monitoring.

Section 5 prohibits the use of a defense to a crime of assault concerning the victim's sexual orientation or gender identity.

Sections 8 through 17 eliminate some sections that are no longer relevant in light of some changes the legislature made concerning issuance and enforcement of domestic violence orders.

Section 18 concerns some additional RCWA provisions that we need to enforce some of the state laws that we'd previously adopted by reference.

Section 19 adds back into our code a provision that we had repealed when we repealed some other ordinances that were designed to assist us in adopting some state laws by reference.

Sections 22 through 27 concern some new and revised firearms laws.

Firearms are prohibited at school board meetings, at demonstrations and at voting facilities and large capacity ammunition magazines and untraceable firearms and unfinished firearms are prohibited.

Section 28 as a new form of false reporting of making a report the results in an emergency response.

I think this is what is called swatting.

And section 29 modifies the crime of bail jumping to require the person has to receive written notice of a court of a next court date that he then would would miss in order to be charged with the crime.

So that's the that's the extent of our of the ordinance.

Thank you.

Could you.

Of the bulleted items in the central staff memo, which items are items that have to be made to be consistent with state law?

Well, as I mentioned, in terms of criminal laws, we don't have to be the same as state law, except for the fact that if a city ordinance and a state law prohibit the same thing, the punishment has to be the same.

So for instance, that's why Section 2 modifies a lot of the punishment for animal cruelty, because there's a state statute prohibiting the same conduct.

In a sense, I guess the...

We don't have to have any of these crimes if we don't want to, but I mean, if we're going to have them, they are largely, I guess it's our advice that they'd be the same as state law for purposes of consistency, such that if there are, say, court decisions affecting some of those laws that they affect, that they will apply to our ordinances as well.

In terms of your specific question, for instance, Section 1 probably is a discretionary law because we don't, and it concerns, um, allows animal control to not return an animal to an owner if the, if the person is convicted of abusing that animal.

Um, that's not required by state law, but I think, but our, our, the attorneys in our office who deal with animal control cases believe that that would be an option doing that.

For instance, Section 3 concerning that I talked about, about which court might have jurisdiction over an electronic communication that violated the corridor, that isn't found in state law either.

So that's in a sense discretionary.

It's just that largely arose from a series of discussions that we've had in our office about how we would go about prosecuting a crime like that.

And again, because People tend to tend to go move around a lot or or be be gone from Seattle occasionally and and and and there's this this ability to to violate an order sort of remotely, and we wanted to make sure that that if that happened that Seattle and that Seattle and escort indeed would have jurisdiction to deal with that violation.

Some of these others again, we don't have to have the crimes, but if we're going to have the crimes they need that the punishment again needs to be the same as state law.

Thank you, so in the bulleted list from central staff, it's the changes to section one and section three that are discretionary but advised by the city attorney's office for good cause.

And the other items are items that are advised to have consistency and prevent conflicting provisions with state law.

Yes.

Thank you.

Any questions or comments from Council Members?

Looking for raised hands.

Thank you.

Not seeing any.

I appreciate you making some time so we could get this before full council before we close up shop on the committees for the budget process.

I understand we did need to take action on this in another bill that we're sending directly to full council on the traffic code by the end of the year.

Not seeing or hearing any additional questions.

I move Council Bill 120424. Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you.

The bill is now before the committee.

And again, just pausing to see if there are any questions or comments.

Not seeing any.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Mosqueda?

Aye.

Council Member Nelson?

Aye.

Council Member Peterson?

Aye.

Vice Chair Lewis.

Yes.

Chair Herbold.

Yes.

Five in favor.

Thank you, the motion carries, and the committee recommendation that the legislation will be sent to the October 4th City Council meeting.

Now I see that Presiding Judge Eisenberg is with us, so let's go back up to agenda item number five.

Can you please read in agenda item five?

Committee agenda item number five, council bill 120424, an ordinance relating to Seattle Municipal Court, authorizing the judges and directors of Seattle Municipal Court to accept the grant and execute related agreements, amending ordinance 126490, which adopted the 2022 budget, changing appropriations to various departments and ratifying and confirming certain prior acts.

For briefing, discussion, possible vote.

Thank you so much.

We are joined by presiding judge Eisenberg of the Seattle Municipal Court to present this item.

Asha Venkataraman provided a central staff memo that is attached to the agenda on this particular piece of legislation, which I understand is a grant acceptance for Seattle Municipal Court.

Presiding Judge Eisenberg, would you like to lead us in discussion?

Sure.

Thank you very much, Council Member Herbold.

I apologize for being late.

Your committee is running more efficiently today than we anticipated.

not that we should be surprised, but I'm running master calendar this morning, which is our jury calendar.

Less public comment than normal, that's all.

Nothing to do with my efficiency.

Anyway, I appreciate the opportunity to come and speak before you and your fellow council members.

And we're grateful to CBO for helping us submit this legislation.

We've gotten this grant from the administrative office of the courts to fund a temporary therapeutic court coordinator, which will work with our multidisciplinary therapeutic courts to provide support and coverage in daily operations, do data analysis and program innovation for specifically the Veterans Treatment Court, our Mental Health Court, our Domestic Violence Intervention Project and the Seattle Community Court.

We also have this, the second grant will support our partnership with the YWCA to fund a community justice navigator.

This position will provide additional support for our community court clients with service follow through and connection.

The Navigator, in particular, will help connect program participants to community service and to enroll, engage, and support participants in sustained community-based treatment or other needed services after they've completed their community court stint.

Both of these are pilots.

We're very excited to be able to pilot these positions and Fortunately, this is not a matching situation.

This doesn't cost the city anything.

This is a grant from the administrative office of the courts, but it's time restricted.

We need to be able to use the funds by next June, otherwise they'll disappear, which is why we asked to expedite this in front of the council for your approval.

Thank you so much.

So yes, I appreciate your requests to get this in front of committee.

Again, this is another one of those pieces of legislation that we need to move through in an efficient and expedited manner to ensure the delivery of these services.

Can you explain, you may have mentioned this, but I didn't catch it.

What is the source of the grant funds?

The Washington State Legislature, I believe, provided some grant money to the court system statewide, and we applied for the grant through the Administrative Office of the Courts, and we received the grant.

So it's a statewide court funding mandate from the legislature.

Got it.

So the state provides these funds to courts throughout the entire state with the goal of, there's a policy goal behind it, which is to help develop these therapeutic courts.

Exactly.

And make sure that they're properly resourced.

Exactly.

And so given that these are both pilot projects, can you just talk a little bit about how they will be evaluated for their success or lessons learned?

Well, one of the positions is actually a position that relates to trying to develop the data itself.

I think That's, I'm not exactly sure how to answer the question.

I think a lot of it's gonna be seeing how they play out on the ground, working with the therapeutic courts specifically and seeing how this position helps the different courts as well as the data that they're gonna be gathering from the background to help us understand the courts.

I think we'll be evaluating one, is it an effective use to have this coordinator position?

Is it effective in the courtrooms?

And then also, are they able to get data that will help us analyze the courts?

As far as the community justice navigation, this is. basically working with our YWCA partnership.

So I think we'd be talking to the Y to see how this, I mean, the goal of the community justice navigator is to basically follow up after someone's done in community court to help keep them on track.

So they're no longer involved in the court directly, but these navigators reaching out, trying to help facilitate any questions or concerns they might have as they've left the court system.

So I think we just have to kind of see if people take advantage of that, They are, you know, making headway and keeping people in the services that you're trying to access and things like that.

It's going to be pretty much like seeing how it works on the ground.

Sure.

It's not clear to me whether or not the state has determined that projects receiving these awards will be considered pilot projects until there's an evaluation or if it's.

municipal court who is determining that these are pilot projects.

Yeah, so this basically the state's not going to be analyzing what we're doing.

They have reached, they have offered money to all the therapeutic courts across the state.

They've also offered money to courts to create therapeutic courts.

So, depending on what you asked for you might be asking to create a mental health court or a community court, or you might be asking to supplement the program you have it's going to be up to us really to see if this pilot proves effective in which case we'd be coming, potentially back to the council to make a pitch for why we think this is successful or not.

I guess, if we don't think it's successful we wouldn't be following up.

But I don't believe AOC is going to be, that's Administrative Office of the Courts, not AOC in Washington, DC.

I don't think that they're going to be analyzing it.

They're throwing out a pretty wide net to courts across the state to help courts develop or expand their community courts, therapeutic courts.

So I'm not aware of any specific analysis they're going to be doing of our specific uses of these grants.

So it sounds like we'll have the opportunity to work together to determine how to evaluate the success of these pilots.

So that's a good opportunity that we'll have.

Yes, thank you.

Can you talk to whether or not the court is committing other non-grant dollars to these functions?

At this point in time, I don't believe we are committing any other funds to it.

I think, again, we wanna kind of see how they're working and if these visions, I think if what we think will be helpful proves to be helpful before we decide whether we're gonna try to apply additional funds to these.

Great, okay, thank you.

Council members, any other questions?

Not seeing any raised hands.

And given that I don't see any other raised hands, let's work to get.

Let's see, what item is this?

I lost my track here, this item number five.

I will, in that case, move Council Bill 120424. Is there a second?

Second.

Thank you.

The bill is now before committee.

Any additional comments from council members about the legislation before us?

I'm not seeing any.

Oh, Council Member Nelson.

I just think it's, I don't see any downside of accepting a grant to try to see how well the therapeutic courts work because we are always looking for alternatives.

Thank you very much for bringing this home, Judge.

Thank you.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Much appreciated all around.

So with that, will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Mosqueda.

Aye.

Council Member Nelson.

Aye.

Council Member Peterson.

Aye.

Vice Chair Lewis.

Yes.

Chair Herbold.

Yes.

Seven in favor.

Thank you.

The motion carries and the committee recommends the council bill be passed and will be sent to the October 4th city council meeting.

Thank you very much.

Have a great afternoon or great day.

Next item is item number 7. Will the clerk please read in agenda item 7.

Committee agenda item number 7. Pay up worker discussion of deactivation and background checks for briefing and discussion.

20 minutes.

Thank you so much.

presenters can please join us at the committee table.

That would be fantastic.

And while people are coming up, I'll just give a little bit of background.

Back at the end of May, the Council unanimously passed the first pay-up bill.

That legislation, the first of its kind, will guarantee that app-based delivery drivers receive a minimum wage.

The bill will increase transparency and protect flexibility, both for drivers and the apps themselves and customers.

As we know, app-based work is one of the fastest growing sectors of our economy, with more workers turning to this type of work.

The passage of this legislation in May will once enacted will help tens of thousands of delivery workers make ends while maintaining their flexibility.

But there's an aspect that the bill, the first bill that we passed does not address and that is the practice of deactivation or otherwise known as preventing folks from working these types of jobs based on information that has come up within the course of the job that may be disputed.

There's also the issue of people being prohibited from working these types of jobs at all based on an automated background check.

So large gig companies are really in the driver's seat and they rely on a lot of automation.

And we've been hearing stories from workers about being prevented from accessing this work either because of a background check or because of information provided, again, often automated information on the course of the job resulting in deactivation.

And...

In some cases, upon further investigation, either the background check was not accurate to the worker or the information that led to the deactivation was also not accurate.

So workers who put a lot of time and energy into these companies are sometimes deactivated, sometimes without even knowing why.

So the bill that we passed in May addresses compensation, transparency, and flexibility.

These workers also need protections to continue the work that the app-based companies themselves rely on.

So we're here to hear about these experiences and to begin the process of developing a fair and transparent process to deactivations.

And today we're going to hear from two driver organizations and workers from those organizations about the issue.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Michael Wolfe and Danielle Alvarado for their introductory remarks and sort of shepherding, facilitating the conversation with workers about their experience.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good morning committee.

Great.

Okay.

My name is Danielle Alvarado.

I'm the executive director of Working Washington.

And as you know, for the past several years, workers in our pay up campaign have been organizing to transform the gig economy.

Earlier this summer, council demonstrated tremendous leadership in passing the app-based worker minimum compensation ordinance.

Protection from deactivation.

Next slide, please.

is essential to making sure the rights in that ordinance are meaningfully accessed by gig workers.

Deactivation is a serious issue for workers across all apps.

It's one of the major ways the platforms exercise control over workers, and it creates massive instability for workers and their families.

Right now, workers are routinely deactivated with no warning, immediately losing access to their entire source of income.

Deactivations typically take place through algorithmic systems with no human oversight.

And workers receive little if no explanation from the platform, sometimes as little as a message that simply says you violated the terms of service.

Next slide, please.

When workers do get some explanation, it's often an unwarranted or just plain wrong basis for the deactivation.

Some of the reasons workers have been deactivated include a selfie not looking enough, like the photo on record, a problem which disproportionately is likely to impact workers of color, uninvestigated or unfounded complaints, which are then not followed up on by the platforms, and falling below a specific rating, which can include customer ratings, but also can include factors like not accepting enough of the jobs sent to them by the platform.

Again, in our experience, a big part of what's going on with deactivation is a problem with the reliance on flawed algorithms that lead to thousands of workers losing their jobs.

And once they're deactivators, workers have little opportunity to appeal.

Next slide, please.

Right now, most options to request review send workers to an automated form or a generic email.

And as Carmen will share, it takes an incredible amount of effort to actually talk to a person.

Some workers send dozens of emails with no response or are simply told by support that they can't discuss the details of their decision.

Next slide.

And when additional review takes place, it's often clear that this decision was an error.

But apps don't currently prioritize staffing support or communicating with deactivated workers, so a review or response is rare.

And at that point, many workers have given up, overwhelmed and frustrated by an opaque process completely controlled by the platforms.

As bad as the status quo is, next slide, the good news is that workers know what needs to change.

An effective deactivation policy would be industry-wide, require that apps provide workers information about why they were deactivated, require that apps create internal appeal systems, and require responses to worker appeals with evidence justifying the deactivation.

An effective system would also require back pay for workers whose deactivations can't be justified.

And it would focus on ensuring that companies proactively create internal systems that prevent and fix unwarranted deactivations rather than relying on individual enforcement to manage individual worker cases after the fact.

Next slide.

Each of those core pieces was already discussed in great detail in stakeholder sessions last year and with that foundation we're in a good position to move this policy forward.

And it's critical that we do so.

The issue is urgent for all the gig workers in Seattle struggling to make ends meet and who face deactivation often for simply exercising their basic flexibility as an independent contractor or for no reason at all.

Council is the opportunity to address this issue with a simple universal policy that creates long overdue accountability for the platforms.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Go ahead.

Hello, my name is Carmen I'm a gig worker in Seattle and a member of the pay up campaign.

I started doing good work about four years ago after a back injury left me partially disabled.

For four years, I have worked full time for Grubhub, even though I am partially disabled.

And on August 8th, I was deactivated.

I had a rating of in the high 90s and was in good standing.

The problems began in mid-July when Grubhub executives decided to squeeze even more profit from the company by issuing drivers a lot more stacked orders.

Stack orders are two orders from the same restaurant or nearby restaurants to be delivered to addresses that are near each other.

However, at the time that that was implemented, the system had not learned the most efficient way to do this.

The order pickups and drop-offs were often not near each other, not on the same routes, or in opposite directions.

I am willing and capable of working two orders simultaneously.

However, I cannot be in two different places at the same time, and I cannot drive in two different directions at the same time.

As I worked the orders, I received warnings and penalties.

These warnings and penalties stacked up and became violations.

In less than six weeks, I racked up three violations and was deactivated.

I called driver support several times and sent several emails.

Driver support was not very supportive.

And my emails disappeared into the oblivion.

The deactivation email had a a space where I could, oh, next slide, I'm sorry.

Okay.

The deactivation email had instructions on how to send an appeal, but the appeal email address was no longer in service.

The pull down menus on driver online support, none of the categories matched what my situation was.

The closest category I could find was deactivations, California only.

And so I sent my appeal there.

A few days later, I received an email that stated I had been deactivated due to adverse behavior an activity that negatively impacts the delivery experience across the platform.

The threat of deactivation is always lurking when working as a gig worker.

I had DoorDash already set up just in case the worst happened with GrubHub.

So when I was deactivated, I could easily move on to the DoorDash platform.

I missed a few days of pay, which set my precarious financial situation into a downward spiral that I am still attempting to climb out of.

Gig company executives like to call gig workers and delivery drivers independent contractors.

The term evolves them of any responsibility an employer would have for an employee, allowing the gig companies to treat delivery drivers as exploitable and disposable.

Independent contractors have little independence.

My immediate supervisor, our manager, is an AI system that cannot be reasoned with or ignored.

With a deactivation policy in place, a human would have to review and respond to deactivations generated by the system and review and respond to any appeal letters.

I have no doubt once my appeal will be written, I have no doubt that once reviewed by a person, I will be reactivated.

It is the responsibility of the company to create a functional process with human review and meaningful appeal procedure before deactivating a driver.

The payoff deactivation policy would not require an investigation of each deactivation case by the city.

Instead, it would create an incentive for apps to set up their own system with a person or team of people making the final deactivation decision.

With more and more companies converting employees into independent contractor, the gig economy needs regulations and policies to ensure gig workers some stability.

Yeah.

You sharing your experiences with us.

Hi, my name is James.

Um, I don't go by Mr. Or sir.

Uh, people question me on that.

And I would say to them, what's more respectable is you calling me what you want to call me or calling me what I request.

With that being said, I am not a worker.

I'm an independent contractor.

I've been doing this for six years now.

I pay the platforms to provide a service for me by connecting me with delivery options or people.

And so I don't report to anybody.

Now, there are guidelines that I have to go by in order to use these platforms.

that will prevent me from getting deactivated temporarily or permanently, which I agree to.

I have been deactivated for a couple of hours.

I was able to contact them and talk through the process of what had happened.

I also find that if something is not from A to B, anything out of the ordinary happens in a delivery or a ride, I report it immediately and it prevents me from being deactivated.

I think the biggest problem with this system is they don't have people who do this on the front line at the table to talk about what's going on because a lot of this can be prevented.

I think a lot of times there are unfortunately some other independent contractors who say they don't know why they've been deactivated when they actually do.

A lot of fact finding needs to be involved in all the decision making because each case is different.

Each reason why someone is deactivated is different.

I agree with the background check because I do want to be safe.

I want to make sure that the person who is delivering or picking me up is legit.

Anyone who comes to my vehicle, I would tell them, check the license plate, make sure that this is the vehicle that you want.

I check names.

There needs to be a little bit more transparency with these companies on, if you do this, you will be activated.

I think they also need to send out a warning.

Hey, you have this score, you're on the verge of being deactivated.

If the behavior doesn't change, you're not making this, you know, there should be more, uh, information giving the warning them ahead of time that you're on the verge of being deactivated.

Thank you.

Thank you, and just for my name is Michael Wolf on the executive director of drive forward, and I prefer he him pronouns.

So, I just want to say there's a lot of broad agreement amongst the driver and independent worker community on the activations and background checks.

In that we don't feel that the companies are being as transparent as they could be in their communications.

I do understand from talking with, you know, victims rights groups that sometimes that's not really possible to be as transparent as one would like.

But having a clearly stated reason why one is being deactivated on an initial email, I think, is something that the companies can certainly produce.

I do think that there does need to be, with any deactivation, a clearly communicated appeals process with a point of contact with a team of people empowered to make decisions on a case-by-case basis.

They're also assuming that that appeal does not go in the driver's favor.

I think there should also, with that denial, be clear instructions on requesting and filing for arbitration, because all of these terms of services do have arbitration clauses in them, which is another avenue for workers to take on.

As far as background checks, I think, you know, I was going through Uber's website the other day, and they all say, oh, you have to pass a background check.

But they don't say what fails a background check.

Having that information available as, you know, if you have these things that are going to show up on your background check, it will likely fail.

You know, having that information public and available would be great.

As far as what should be something that doesn't pass a background check, I think the language in House Bill 2076 Section 23 that just passed the legislature last session is a good basis to look at.

And that was something that was language that the companies actually, or at least the rideshare companies, actually agreed to.

So with that, I just want to say that we should be looking at requiring companies to have a little more transparency, requiring companies to have some kind of appeals process internally, and then to be able to communicate how a worker can access arbitration.

So that would be my statement.

I just want to actually mention one other thing here since I'm here.

And this has to do with the issue of driver safety.

And two weeks ago, there was a senseless killing of a rideshare driver in downtown Seattle because of gun violence.

Mr. Mohammed Qaidi left behind a wife and six children.

It's not lost on me that we are here at the Public Safety Committee.

And, you know, while discussing deactivations and background checks is necessary, I certainly would ask this committee to have another discussion like this on how the city would like to address increased gun violence and the safety of independent app-based contractors working in Seattle against the scourge of gun violence.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

So, as it relates to the topic before us today, want to just get a sense from both of these worker organizations that we have before us.

And I don't think the dispute is with the term worker.

The dispute is whether or not workers are independent contractors who are workers or employees.

I think we can, I hope, agree that because you're doing work, you are a worker, you may not consider yourself an employee.

Although that also is a matter of a lot of conversation.

So do we feel like there is some, it sounds like there's some agreement on the problem statement.

Have your organizations had conversations about the path forward for a solution?

I would I would say that you know we've certainly talked about it amongst our members and have sort of had some discussions as to what our members would like to see in in these kinds of issues.

And, you know, as I said, there's really broad agreement that the companies do need a little bit more transparency in why they're deactivating someone.

If that deactivation is because of customer complaints or it's because, you know, there is, you know, a failed background check or, you know, a failed motor vehicle records check, you know, those things have to be clearly communicated.

Now, I understand there's probably going to be a line drawn if, you know, the complaints against the customer are, involve a sexual assault, sexual harassment as a way to protect the victim.

But, you know, beyond that and other cases similar to that, I think having a clear reason stated as opposed to, hey, you just violated our terms of service is is is something that tell us which term of service you violate.

And if I can add, I think that in addition to the stakeholder and we've been doing with our respective members, and it does sound like there's a lot of agreement about some of the issues that need to be addressed.

I know certainly it's a priority for our organization to take advantage of the window we have this fall to continue the conversations between our organizations to make sure that we can further clarify where those points of agreement and how can we identify additional particulars about the policy that we can bring to discussions with council and support us moving forward when you all are less occupied with the budget.

Thank you.

Yes.

The budget break is also, as you say, a window of opportunity for external stakeholders to work to get some alignment and agreement on policy that we then can look at taking up after that.

Yes.

My grandparents were married for over 50 years.

And so I asked my grandfather, how did that work?

And so I call myself sitting down for a long drawn out explanation.

And he said, I talk some and I listened some.

And that's what needs to happen here is we need to get the people together and do some old fashioned communication.

Danielle, I was wondering if you could just say a couple words about what you were thinking when it comes to enforcement and the, you know, under the TNC legislation, we saw large, very large numbers of filings of intakes.

that some of them turn into investigation, some of them don't.

But I think if we were to see that same volume that was seen coming out of enforcement of the TNC, enforcement of this legislation would be a real challenge.

And I thought I heard you say that you did not believe that these would all, that that there would be a large number of intakes for for deactivation appeals.

Yeah, thank you for the question.

I think we take very seriously to the policies we develop have a pathway to being enforced and making sure that our partners, you know, whether it's through private enforcement or the Office of Labor Standards have the resources they need to do that work and to enforce our other labor standards.

Like we said, I think our experience talking to workers through our organizing is that some of the issues that both our organizations have flagged as trends and deactivation are things that we really think can be addressed with a framework that is oriented towards proactive policy setting by the platforms.

I really think some of the things we've talked about, our goal is to develop a framework where that is set up at the front end so we are not reliant on resolving individual problems on the back end.

And we certainly, we have other partners who focus on the TNC work and we have had conversations with people, the learning lessons from that implementation and understanding that it has been very resource intensive.

And we also think this is an opportunity for, you know, the council who has innovated in this, the gig economy space in general to take some learnings from that work and have how we approach enforcement in this way to be just as impactful and in a resource conscious way.

Perfect.

Thank you.

That's an exciting way to look at it.

Moving forward, for sure.

Do you mind, Council Member, if I address that also?

So I think from our organization's perspective, it would be best to not go down the road of the sort of TNC Resolution Center in particular.

We've had many members who haven't deactivated on the ride share apps who have filed appeals through that system.

And the general consensus is it's taking somewhere between anywhere between eight weeks to eight months before any resolution is happening.

And for a lot of these, a lot of our members have gone through that's that's too long they've moved on to other employment.

not to say that it's good or bad necessary, but I think finding a new solution that probably is less resource intensive and more responsive would be good.

Thank you both.

Thank all of you.

Council Members, any other questions before I just say a couple words about next steps?

Council Member Nelson.

You might, you might be ready just to get to this, but has has started the rulemaking process on pay up in general.

Yes, they have not begun the- Council Member, this is Alex Clardy here with Council Member Herbold's office.

They have not started that yet.

They'll be starting that process in, excuse me, 2023. The ordinance goes into effect in January 2024. So they have a little over a year to conduct that rulemaking process.

Thank you.

Well, it passed in May, right?

So we're early June.

So it seems like, we need to, there are a lot of details about implementation that still need to be put in place.

And it seems like this is, you know, deactivation and enforcement of deactivation and all that seems like it's part of it.

The effective date of any legislation that we would be considering as relates to deactivation would be harmonized with the effective date of payout.

We wouldn't have Um, this legislation that we're talking about now related to deactivation just go into effect before, um, the work that OLS has to do, uh, to develop rules with, uh, again, as Alex mentioned, which they have a full year, it, pay up does not go into effect until 2024. Um, so the effective date of a bill that we're, we would be talking about here would be harmonized with that.

Okay, thank you.

Sure.

Any other comments or questions?

Really, again, appreciate folks making time in their day to come and talk with us about sort of what the issue is that we're trying to work together to address.

And I really am heartened by the partnership of your two organizations to help us think through the policy issues.

As far as What's next?

I know that Council Member Lewis and I are working together on how to address the issues of deactivation, and we're working with the Office of Labor Standards on developing a policy framework for legislation.

And we will, as we did with PAYA, work with stakeholders well prior to the introduction of any legislation.

And just as far as, you know, a little bit more texture on what that looks like, we'll begin to have stakeholder meetings following the council's budget process.

That's in December.

And again, many thanks to Drive Forward and Working Washington, especially James and Carmen.

I appreciate you sharing your experiences with us.

I know the work that you do is not always easy, and I appreciate you taking time out of your day, your income earning day, to come and speak with us.

And with that, I have nothing further.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, moving on.

Will the clerk please read in agenda item eight?

Committee agenda item number eight, city attorney's office, criminal division, quarter two, 2022 report for briefing and discussion.

20 minutes.

Thank you so much.

We're joined by deputy city attorney, Scott Lindsey and Per Olaf Swanson, strategic advisor of data analytics at the city attorney's office.

Thank you for coming to committee today to present the second quarter city attorney's office report.

And thank you as well for your earlier in-person briefing that touched on the challenging data work involved.

I appreciate you newly doing this analysis.

The item is scheduled for 20 minutes.

And as mentioned, we do have a hard stop so that those of us who are intending to go to the mayor's speech on the budget can do so.

Take it away.

Absolutely.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold and to all the council members present today.

This is really a great opportunity.

My name is Scott Lindsey.

I'm the Deputy City Attorney.

I'm joined by Para-Olaf Swanson, our Data Analytics Manager.

We're here, of course, on behalf of City Attorney Anne Davison and excited to present the second quarterly report of the City Attorney's Office.

This report, which you will see here, and we're going to provide in summary form, I'm just going to provide a couple of quick highlight remarks and then turn it over to Per.

This report provides really an unprecedented level of transparency into the operation of the Criminal Division and the Seattle Municipal Criminal Justice System.

Never before in the history of this office have we, the city attorney's office, presented this level of detail to allow the scrutiny of the public, the scrutiny of the council and the executive into the operation.

So we're very excited to share it with you.

And again, Council Member Herbold, really appreciate the chance that you've presented for us to share it directly with council and to engage with you on this topic.

I just want to hit on two major points that you're going to see in the report and that Para will touch on.

The first is that in the report, there's a lot of data that really represents a significant turnaround of the city attorney's office under city attorney Davison in the last nine months.

Her focus has been on making filing decisions quickly with her close in time policy.

That's meant a really significant reduction of the time to make those filing decisions.

From on average over 100 days to on average at this point, the median time is three days as of the quarter two period.

So that's a really extraordinary drop.

The city attorney's office is making filing decisions faster.

That is having a lot of consequent effects.

It's allowing our office to engage and get better results with victims.

So we're seeing fewer cases that we have to decline later because victims refuse to engage or we can't contact the victims.

It also helps keep those cases fresher, so we're seeing better results as those cases go into the criminal justice system.

The report also reflects some of the very real challenges that you and our city are grappling with on a daily basis, particularly challenges around police staffing.

We still have a relatively low number of total police referrals to the city attorney's office for misdemeanor criminal activity.

I think that's fair to say is a reflection of the staffing shortage, as well as the prioritization that the police have to focus on felony and violent crime at this point.

So you'll see those stats reflected here.

Right now, I'm going to turn it over to Per Olaf.

He'll go for about eight or nine minutes and then we'll have 10 minutes for questions.

Thank you.

Thank you, Scott.

So I'm going to give a quick overview of what's in the report.

But I wanted to start first with a little talk about what our criminal case management system is like.

You see this window on the left, kind of icons from a 1980s video game.

It's a very outdated system that we are in the process of replacing.

Hopefully we'll have the new one next year and things will be simpler.

But if you look at the data structure, this middle graph here, It looks crazy and a weird web of complicated things, but the fact is it's not complicated enough.

It doesn't allow for looking at things like a defendant and a victim at the same time, finding information on them at the same time, which are things that are very important to city attorney Davison, and I believe the council as well.

And so that resulted in very simplistic reports that were put out by this office in the past.

So- Can you speak up just a little bit?

I'm sorry.

Oh, yeah.

Hopefully this thing isn't giving issues.

So at the department, we made a concerted effort and essentially were able to combine all the different parts of the database in a way to give meaningful data.

Required something in the range of 15 million formulas to do so, but it resulted in this 50 page quarterly report, which you can find on our website.

The links are all over there, or if you have a digital copy of this, you can just click the link there.

And so some brief highlights, this shows our misdemeanor referrals coming into the department from SPD.

You can see there was a dip during the pandemic that hasn't fully recovered.

And as Scott pointed out, this is most likely because of the staffing issues, because the Seattle Police Department crime numbers do not reflect a lower state.

They're actually higher than they were in the past.

And so we would expect more misdemeanor referrals if the police were fully staffed.

So now looking at what our department does with those referrals, the green bar shows how many filed cases are And so you can see in quarter one.

When city attorney Davidson came in, she made.

Effort to kind of make the department more efficient.

And those gains are even higher in quarter two.

So if you look just at the filed cases, it's more than doubled since quarter two of 2021. We aren't getting more referrals in, but this represents tackling of the backlog.

And a big thing that allowed us to accomplish this was our post-in-time filing that Scott mentioned.

So here you can see the median time to file or make a filing decision on a report going back to 2017. And yes, during the pandemic, it was very high, but even before then, it was still in the range of 100. And now we are down to three days for a median decision.

That means a lot of them are decided very quickly.

But there are still some that take a little longer.

But the median is kind of what a victim would expect to wait in order for a decision to be made on their case.

That has had a really large impact in our office.

So you could see before with just the higher filing and defined numbers, but also with the backlog.

So here you can see the growth of the backlog since 2019. It did dip slightly in the beginning of the pandemic because attorneys were able to revert from the closed courts to handling filing decisions.

But then afterwards, when City Attorney Davison came in, it was nearly 5,000 cases.

And you can see that highest point, that's when the close in time filing decision policy was initiated.

And since then, it has gone down quite a lot.

In quarter two, the department cleared 900 cases from the backlog of cases under review.

This has also led to lower decline rates.

So you can see here.

Can you go back to the backlog for just one second?

I just want to add here that the the prior administration policy was that all new cases went to the back of the line.

And so cases were reviewed chronologically or reverse chronologically.

Yes, chronologically.

We have stopped that policy.

all new cases are reviewed again within those three days.

The backlog represents these are the cases that came in that were kind of left over from 2020 and 2021. So we'll continue to try and whittle down those cases, make strategic filing decisions that include a lot of declines because cases just are not ripe anymore.

The evidence is gone or it's hard to contact victims.

But those, we are no new cases, any incident referred to our office today is not going into the backlog.

It's getting that filing decision within that five day timeline.

Just to clarify.

Thank you, Per.

Thank you, Scott.

So with that, you can see these are the decline rates for different categories of referrals.

The light blue is domestic violence.

The kind of tan color is criminal traffic and then the Green is your kind of typical street crimes, thefts, assaults, things like that.

You can see that decline rates have gone down, especially when you only look at the new ones that are coming in.

So the solid lines would include things from the backlog, whereas the dashed lines would not include things from the backlog.

And this is largely attributed to, as Scott mentioned, the information is fresher.

Witnesses are still around.

memories are better, evidence is easier to collect, and it's just made the system more efficient.

So this is kind of a crazy looking chart, but what this shows is the percentage of reasons of why we decline cases.

And so I want you to focus on the top two, the orange and the green.

Those are related to victims or witnesses.

So the green is not being able to contact a victim.

And, you know, That's actually a pretty big problem because if we have good evidence, but we can't even get ahold of the victim, it's harder to prosecute a crime and then the victim doesn't feel like justice is being served.

And a big reason that was high was because the amount of time it took for a victim to be engaged.

And if you look specifically like domestic violence, it's a very large issue.

And it had been about a quarter of all of our domestic violence declines were because of that.

And now it's down to about 8%.

The close in time policy has made the office more efficient, but it's also given us better contact with victims made our prosecutorial decision stronger and just all around is help the department.

And so that particular slide is across all charges.

If we were to look at an individual charge, for instance, as you say, like domestic violence, we would see a different a different proportion of colors on these bars.

And as you mentioned, with domestic violence, we would probably see a larger bar for the orange because a high percentage of declines in those cases are related to the victims not participating.

Is that the case?

Both in the orange and the green.

So not participating and inability Domestic violence is inherently more victim-related.

Thank you.

So I'm going to pivot now to alternatives to traditional prosecution.

So by their nature, they're complicated.

It can sometimes be hard to capture them within a single graph.

So I'm going to show you two.

But you can see the various different alternatives, like pre-file and free trial diversion, community court, mental health court, veterans court.

And they're kind of proportional.

how many of the referrals we get end up interacting with these various alternatives.

There's a large spike in quarter two of 2020, and you might be asking yourself, well, community court started in quarter three of 2020, and a lot of cases that had been filed were diverted into community court then, so that's why you see that kind of spike.

And if you look at 2022, there's another spike up.

That is not necessarily because of a change in policy, that if we go back You can see the same spike up in our filing decisions.

So it's actually been proportional throughout the last several years since the court came into existence, the proportion of cases sent to community court has stayed constant.

And then this chart shows the amount of hearings for each of the courts.

So you can see here, there's nothing before quarter two or before quarter three of 2020 with community court because this represents the court side.

you can see it's much more consistent there.

Same with Mental Health Court, it's been picking up lately, likely because of recovery from the pandemic.

And then Deferred Prosecution and Veterans Court have been relatively constant for quite a while.

And then we can come back to this if you have questions further.

One last thing, I just want to show a little mapping of where our referrals come from.

So the central map shows just all of our referrals coming in.

There is a clear for Seattle is where, and Capitol Hill, is where most of our referrals come from, but there are also other hotspots such as Ballard or Northgate, U District, Rainier Valley.

And you can also look, if you look at like where the domestic violence is, it's not necessarily exactly the same.

Same with criminal traffic, you know, that tends to follow the, where the major roads are, where the bars are, things like that.

And so the mapping is kind of, it's starting to give our office the ability to look deeper into trends and kind of understand things better.

So with that, I will open things up for questions.

Looking to see whether council members have questions.

Council Member Lewis.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

And thank you to our panel from the city attorney's office for this report.

This is excellent information.

Can we go back to slide nine, please?

Yes.

So looking at the 2022 data, which is probably the most dispositive for how to plan for the near future and drilling into.

the reasons for declines, it seems like a fairly consistent pattern over the years of analyzing decline data is the unable to meet the burden of proof.

And I wonder if there's a discussion with the office and SPD on the nature of casework that gets forwarded to the office.

to try to take a bigger hack into that because I know from personal experience that has been an ongoing issue in being able to decline fewer cases and seek some kind of action on a higher proportion of cases.

And I wonder what some of the initiatives the office is using to break into that category.

That's a great question.

Council Member Lewis, thank you.

And thanks for adding your personal experience as well.

This is a major issue for the office.

And one of the initiatives that we have in coordination with Chief Diaz and the Seattle Police Department command team, I don't know if Brian Maxey is still on the call, but is to particularly focus on training of officers on report writing.

For the past several years, we've had both a drop in the number of veteran officers, an increase in new officers, and because of pandemic-related restrictions and complications, I think not great training opportunities about report writing.

So our focus is to work with the Seattle Police Department on improving that report writing, make sure that essential elements of the crime are being included in the report up front.

That also will mean if it is included up front, that if, you know, for the first time, patrol, you know, identifies and writes a report on a crime and submits that referral, that we have less, we need to rely less on follow-up units like the general investigations unit.

As you're probably aware, The property crime general investigations unit is very short-staffed at this point, having sent a lot of its detectives off into patrol roles.

And so there's really just very limited ability to follow up on misdemeanor crimes.

We really need the patrol units to get it right the first time and make it an actionable case, because it can very often be difficult to get that follow-up.

So that's the focus of the office.

And so far we are seeing I think some early results of those training efforts but those are really just starting to get going in the last couple of months to improve those outcomes.

Thank you for that answer and looking forward to continuing to tackle that significant plurality of the source of declines.

What information can the office shed on the nearly fifth of cases that fall into the other category for the second quarter of 2022?

My suspicion is they might have been policy related, but that's its own separate category.

So what are some of the things that fall into other?

Let's see, Per, do you have insight on that?

Yeah, so it's complicated.

There are many, many reasons for declines.

And so it could be something, sometimes lead is involved with the other reason and lead is never a single thing, but you know, it'd be the person is showing that they have got access to resources and they're actually utilizing the system and a decline is sent out that way.

It could be, you know, something like a felony filing, you know, something like We package it with a larger, like organized retail thefts.

It could really be a dozen, a couple dozen different things.

If you want, I could give you a deeper breakdown of it.

But in the quarterly report, there actually is kind of an expansion of the other category.

Let's see what page that's on.

Page 25 of the quarterly report breaks the other down.

So you can see, you know, how many of them are, so there's mental incompetency, there's technical issues.

There's bargain fees, felony filings, many different things.

So the other category includes competency?

Yes.

And you can see roughly what percent of that if you look at the page one and five of the quarterly report.

Yeah.

Thank you for clarifying that.

Appreciate that.

And oh, it's a recent incompetency finding from a different case that then they apply to this, like that particular study.

Thank you.

Councilmember Nelson.

Thank you for this.

Just on that note about detectives and, you know, the fact that they've been deployed to patrol, I went to roll call at the North Precinct last night and and heard from officers that that is in fact a struggle.

If people aren't able to investigate some of these crimes, then obviously there wouldn't be enough proof.

But my question is about the blue category, diversion policy related.

I'd like to hear more about that because I thought that only about 1% of referrals to LEAD come from So why is that category so big?

It includes community court, mental health court.

Take it away.

It's not just LEAD.

Go ahead, Per.

So I think we have slides on it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

LEAD would probably not be a huge part of that.

A lot of it would be things like pre-file diversion.

So this is only looking at declines.

And so things that interacted before we actually filed the case.

The policy part, it is part of the spike up in quarter two is declining some very old backlog cases.

If you look at the alternatives here, you can see that free file diversion is still lower than it was pre-pandemic.

It's starting to go back up again.

It has a little bit of natural fluctuation just because they don't schedule their their classes to meet like within a quarter.

So, you know, they could have like three in one quarter and one in the next just because of the way like their operations are.

So you won't always get like a consistent quarter to quarter look at that.

That would be a bigger part of it.

Okay, thank you.

This chart represents the things, the interventions that go into the policy-related declines.

But then there's also, I think I heard you say, there's also the number of cases that you're not pursuing because they're stale cases.

That is also fitting into the policy-related declines as well.

Right, so historically about 3% of our declines are policy-based, but that number is higher in quarter two because of just some very old backlog things that were for non-person crimes that we looked at and diverted them, or sorry, declined them for that reason.

Thank you.

And to clarify for this current slide, many of these are not just declined cases.

Many of these are filed cases, but are filed into an alternative court.

So a filed case that goes into community court.

A filed case that goes into community court if the person successfully graduates community court by say attending a two-hour life skills class, that case would be dismissed at that point.

But these represent a mix of pre-file and filed cases here.

And so the cases on this slide wouldn't show up on the previous slide until it was a successful diversion.

No, the prior slide is declines, which are different from dismissals.

So declines would be the upfront, dismissals would be you filed the case.

So the decision-making matrix is file or decline a case.

And then once the case is in progress, It can be, you know, prosecuted to its end result of a guilty or not guilty plea or jury finding or dismissed along the way for a variety of reasons.

So these are this report that that successful diversions become declines.

So go ahead.

Okay.

Successful pre file diversions become declines.

Got it.

So like a successful pre trial diversion would become a dismissal.

Perfect.

Thank you.

Basically, we've got multiple multiple points where we can try and off ramp, you know, into alternatives, you know, for depending on depending on the circumstances.

I'm looking for questions from other colleagues.

I do have two other, what I hope will be quick questions, but want to defer to other council members.

Not seeing any.

I have a question about the, both the DV declines and the DUI declines.

As it relates to DV declines, you have, of course, explained why that is.

And the report references that DV referrals require more time flexibility to allow for a trauma-informed approach, including outreach and services to the victim and a thoughtful consideration of the safety risk impacts to the victim and the victim's desired outcome when making a filing decision.

And so I'm wondering, Does this time flexibility and this focus on a trauma-informed approach, is it expected to, you know, maybe you're not making filing decisions in three days, but we are seeing fewer declines in, you know, pursuing cases but maybe making the decision a little bit later.

Are we anticipating that this focus on allowing for time flexibility and using a trauma-informed approach might have a different outcome if applied over a period of time?

I'm not sure I fully understand the question, Council Member.

Can we expect to see changes?

I think the answer is yes.

Well, the answer is yes, that we are seeing changes with respect to victim engagement, which is a hugely important metric that we judge ourselves by.

And clearly, victim engagement was a major problem in the past.

And victims did not want to participate in cases when the office was only reaching out and only even opened up the case eight, nine months after the incident.

If we file that case promptly, there's just a much greater likelihood of victim engagement.

And victim engagement in domestic violence cases is the essential element to success.

So we are actually seeing on the ground changes with increased victim engagement.

I think, and we had this discussion as well, and really appreciate your interest in the topic there's a lot more that can continue to be done according to our domestic violence advocates in our office and our domestic violence prosecutors.

One of the underlying challenges and experiences that they face is that very often, or relatively often, victims will want the intervention of police officers to stop an abusive situation in progress but then for a variety of reasons related to their victimhood are disinclined to pursue the criminal justice system prosecution of those cases.

So there are a number of ways that we can change those outcomes and also make the criminal justice system a better place for victims where they think that they're going to get a better outcome for themselves in their situation.

Thank you.

And if I could add really quick, Scott, the close in time filing, the median time for non-DV referrals is two days.

And then with DV, it's three days, which then brings the total median up to three days.

So it is a, we do already spend more time with it.

Thank you.

And then on the DUIs, I see that the rate of, historically, there've been very low decline rates, but they've been rising lately.

And you believe it might be because of delays at the state toxicology lab that has resulted in some declines.

Do you have any information about what's causing those delays, how long they are and what can potentially turn that around?

Is this another another element of a workforce staffing issue in the age of the great resignation?

Or is it something else?

The the state toxicology lab is experiencing incredible delays, this is affecting prosecutions for DUIs and other drug-related cases, drug and alcohol-related cases across the state.

So this is a very serious issue.

The last I heard that those delays were upwards of nine months.

And so that really means that cases can go stale.

Maybe an officer retires in the meantime, So this is a major issue for us and one that we would be eager to engage with you on whatever pressure we can apply.

I know there's a lot of pressure on the governor and Washington State Patrol as it is to get this problem fixed because it affects Washington State Patrol as well.

And I'm sorry, if you answered this part of the question, I didn't catch it.

What is causing the delays?

Do we know?

They had a variety of...

I think my cursory understanding, Council Member, is that there are a number of issues, staffing, and they had a serious contamination issue at one of their labs that, in effect, closed that down.

And so they've had to consolidate their operations.

And that just meant that they're just wildly behind.

Thank you.

Any other questions from colleagues before we move on to our last item on the agenda?

not seeing any again really appreciate you guys being here with us today, this is.

Again, really appreciated that there is more of a focus on on this sort of in the weeds data that will really do a lot to help create transparency.

around the work that the city attorney's office is doing in being responsive to the diverse community safety needs of our community.

So really appreciate your being here with us today and appreciate the work that I know goes behind not just producing this report, but the work of the city attorneys to address these cases.

So really extend my thanks.

Thank you very much, council member.

Very much appreciate the opportunity.

Thank you, council members.

All right.

Will the clerk please read in agenda item nine.

Committee agenda item number nine, risk management, excuse me, risk managed demand analysis for briefing and discussion.

Excellent.

Thank you.

We're joined by Dan eater of the mayor's office, Brian maxi and Lauren afterly of the Seattle Police Department.

We have 45 minutes scheduled for this item and a hard stop at 1130. So that means We're like 40 minutes.

And hopefully we'll allow for some time for council members to ask questions before we head off.

Some of us head off to the mayor's budget speech at noon.

But with that, I'm just going to turn it over to the executive team to go through the presentation.

Thank you, council member.

I will kick things off.

Good morning, Dan Eater, mayor's office policy director.

Can you hear me OK?

Excellent.

Mayor Harrell shares the council's stated goal of identifying opportunities to address 911 calls with responses that are best suited to public safety needs.

This will mean emphasizing alternatives to traditional policing for some 911 call types.

Today, you're going to hear a presentation about data that will help the city make decisions about how to deploy valuable and scarce public safety staffing resources.

We're not here today to present a set of specific solutions or immediately implementable action items, but rather to give a progress report on the state of the research that we've been doing.

To that end, the mayor's office and council central staff have developed an approach for diversifying the city's public safety responses.

Specifically, we have developed a so-called term sheet that will guide our work together.

The term sheet includes the following three goals.

Reduce harm to BIPOC communities, preserve first responder capacity for appropriate work, and increase the rate of response and timeliness, particularly for priority three and priority four 911 calls.

This is a tall order and it's important work.

As you'll hear today, SPD, the Seattle Police Department, has been working on risk management research to address both this administration's public safety priorities and also the City Council's Statement of Legislative Intent, specifically SPD-017A-001.

The research points to opportunities for optimizing public safety responses.

That means addressing 911 calls with the right types of staff who are deployed at the right times.

We know that this will involve some changes compared to the status quo.

And this is going to take some time.

In the coming months, following the timelines that were established in the term sheet, the mayor's office and the council central staff will continue to work together cooperatively.

Implementing changes in public safety responses will require not only a decision about what situations are best handled in different ways, but also capacity building, infrastructure development, and for some solutions, bargaining with our labor partners.

With the Chair's permission, I'll pass the spotlight to Brian Maxey, the Police Department's Chief Operating Officer, who will walk you through some background and context, and then Lauren Atherley, also from SPD, will guide you through the current research and findings.

And then of course, we'll all be available to address questions.

Thank you.

And I just want to clarify, because you did mention the term sheet.

The work is contemplated in the term sheet, and the development of some pilots is distinct from the long-term comprehensive work that the RMD, I mean, there will be some I think, informing of the pilot from the RMD analysis.

But the RMD analysis, as you mentioned, is a long-term project that is intended to diversify response across many, many different call types, whereas the term sheet work is focused on identifying a couple of call types that we can divert on a shorter timeline.

So just want to, there's been a lot of public confusion about what the conversation was in my last committee meeting about the term sheet and how it relates to this RMD analysis and just want to be clear for the viewing public.

With that, yes, Brian, you want to take it away?

Yeah, thank you, Chair Herbold, and thank you, Dan, for the introduction here.

And thank you to the Public Safety Committee for this opportunity to present phase one of the risk-managed demand analysis.

Honestly, I'm very excited to have this conversation today.

It's been a long time coming.

And I've worked with a lot of departments nationally, and none that I'm aware of have even attempted this level of risk analysis.

As Chief Diaz has publicly stated on many occasions, SPD is fully committed to exploring options to create the most comprehensive public safety system we can, and we welcome creative effective alternative solutions.

What we present to this committee today is a sandbox of opportunity that addresses the fundamental question, what calls can we safely find alternative solutions to resolve?

And safety is the key here.

This analysis looks historically at injuries associated with a final call type and sets the foundation to predict risk moving forward.

And this is important.

These are final call types, not initial call types designated by dispatchers.

So this information in this analysis is in 2020 hindsight, looking back at what happened and what the outcomes were.

The next step in this process is to translate this understanding of risk into a real-time tool to help dispatchers predict how a call might end.

If we don't know what an incident is at the outset, we certainly can't send the right-sized response predictably.

Overall, however, we are offering the most expansive set of call types that SPD can predict safe to consider for alternatives.

This analysis does not say what you should do.

It does not say what is legally appropriate.

It does not include issues of practicality, costs, or labor considerations.

It assigns call types based on historical risk of physical injury.

Before I turn this over to Lauren Atherly to present the analysis and findings, I want to stress our efforts at transparency.

Prior to this committee meeting, we provided a spreadsheet of the analysis results.

The formulas are in that spreadsheet.

We also submitted a detailed memo explaining what we did.

We pointed out that some call types, such as officer training or directed patrol activity, Those things that can only be done by an officer by definition, while they're included in the total analysis, we did break them out on the spreadsheet and say and put them into a separate tab and say these really are different in kind, because these can't be diverted because, you know, by definition, they are officer activity.

And then there were some limitations to the strict math and SPD made some adjustments to some call classifications.

For example, initially, welfare check was categorized by the model as a tier one requiring a police response because there has been an associated death.

with that type of call.

As we reviewed this, we recategorized this as Tier 3, saying it is amenable to a civilian response with police awareness that response is happening.

This is a judgment call, and I suspect we will discuss that more here today, but it was our best effort to make the prediction fit our understanding of operations.

But importantly, we showed our work in all respects.

Nothing is hidden, nothing should be a surprise, and it is our intent to continue to update and refine this model working forward.

This is not a one and done analysis, and we look forward to doing this collaboratively into the future.

At this point, I'll turn it over to Lauren Atherley and come back to you with questions after.

Thank you very much.

If it's all right, I can share my screen.

Just a second to make sure I can do this correctly.

Can you all see that all right?

Okay.

So thanks for that introduction and My computer struggles a little bit with screen share, so I'll try to stay on camera.

But if I have to, I might turn off my camera just to keep things flowing so I don't freeze up.

So I'm going to do a quick review of kind of how we got to this point, discuss a little bit the work that's been done to date, go over the severity and likelihood definitions as calculated in their sort of initial phase one form, Talk a little bit about the phase one risk matrix.

I will also obviously be covering the topic of risk management, a little bit.

So these items are familiar and then talk about that sort of high level.

strategic consideration and the capacity forecast.

We're going to go over a little bit of the considerations, limitations of the data and the analysis itself, what it means, what it doesn't mean, and the way that some of those limitations have been controlled, and then talk a little bit about the technical and infrastructure next steps for the analysis.

So I think a good place to start is is risk managed demand as a concept and and that concept has actually been in development now for.

I would say just about a year and a half, so this is a continuation of the Nick junior analysis, I think, first i'd like to maybe challenge the.

characterization that the police department disagrees with the Nick Jr. analysis.

That's not my perspective.

I think it's a fantastic model.

In fact, you'll see that we are continuing that call response model.

The tiers as established in the Nick Jr. analysis are the tiers that we've adopted for implementation here.

The limitation of the Nick Jr. analysis is actually in its implementation.

You know, as I've mentioned before, and I mentioned in our previous briefing, the initial call type doesn't necessarily indicate the final call type.

In fact, they're different from each other between 50 and 97% of the time.

And so when you're using that perfect information about what service ends up being provided at the end of that call, which is roughly what that final call type represents, it's a little difficult to take that information on the front end and apply it to the call triage function.

And that is essentially what this whole body of work is about.

It's about triaging the roughly 400,000 or so calls that come in and get created into events in the computer-aided dispatch system so that we can right-size the response.

So, to date, we have designed the risk managed demand method around some accepted approaches to risk management adopted primarily from commercial aviation.

and other industries that are sort of similarly situated to manage pretty diverse and kind of non-linear approaches to their operations.

Not every action is quite as patterned as it could be in like a production-oriented environment.

And then have adopted that model, developed the data, and populated the initial matrix.

So that's that design component.

We have a partner for implementing this.

So once the strategic piece of analysis is in place and there are some action items, being able to take action on those call response tiers and provide that information to CSCC and the first response ecosystem requires some complicated infrastructure to be in place.

And some of that is actually fairly novel.

So we have contracted that work.

Those contracts are in place and scheduled and on track.

We've coordinated with our partners at SFD and ITD to develop prototype data.

These data are unique.

I think one of the significant challenges, and I'll note in some of the limitations, are The challenges associated with bringing together data that are contained in two different systems.

So instead of using police data strictly we actually use some objective criteria that are generated by the fact of an aid response which happens outside of the police response infrastructure the administrative systems and so bringing those data together.

and doing it correctly is a little bit of a challenge.

So that was a novel piece of work also that had to be completed here.

And that will be going into production so that this piece of analysis continued in the future.

There's sort of a continuous improvement approach to keeping track of the risk categories and their resulting outcomes.

and then conducted the sort of initial risk assessment risk management for the staffing estimates or sort of capacity estimates we'll be discussing here.

And I would like to clarify this notion of risk assessment, which naturally comes before the act of risk management is strictly within the context of sort of a safety or industrial safety kind of approach things and not at all and sort of other applications within the criminal justice system that use the term.

This is very much just sort of taking an objective approach to understanding the likelihood that a severe outcome will happen as evaluated based on the approximately 2 million records that were considered in this analysis.

So just a quick recap.

When we're discussing risk management, you know, the approach takes into consideration the history of the organization.

So in this case, given the limitations of the data, we're actually considering about a five and a third year period of time and any of the severe outcomes that can occur there in their worst case state.

So we take about 356 individual call types, And we consider the worst case scenario associated with that particular call type, but obviously you know if you only consider the worst case scenario.

There are a whole lot of things that don't make a lot of sense to do and I think that's probably one of the reasons that.

9-1-1 response operations and general response to the myriad calls for service that municipalities get receive an all hazards responder, which is the standard approach to managing this body of work.

Not really sort of given complete information or an adequate forecast to understand what the risk of that event is, most municipalities send a police officer just in case.

So it's not just the most severe outcome, but it's also how likely that outcome occurs.

So severity as one component, one leg of that risk assessment in this study is actually defined by some objective criteria based on the outcomes associated with that event.

So the Nick Jr. analysis is pretty well contained within the call data.

that initial or that final call type and a reading, sort of a plain language reading of what that call type sounds like.

Risk-managed demand actually receives the outcomes.

So instead of just considering that final call type, considers the outcomes associated where somebody was killed or injured and what level of care was necessary to support that person.

And I think it's important to note that that particular outcome is an independent measure of the police department.

So we tried to, as much as possible, make that outcome that is being used in assessing the risk of this event independent of police observations and police data.

The other leg of this risk assessment, obviously, is likelihood.

The definitions of likelihood prior to this stage had not actually been defined.

We needed to take a cut of the data and kind of see how they naturally stratify or split out to determine what these thresholds are.

The definitions are on the screen here.

Very unlikely event, that most severe event occurring, very unlikely is at or below 1% of the time.

Unlikely, as defined, is at or below 5%, obviously above 1%.

Possible at or below 10% likely at or below 25% and very likely would be 50% or higher.

Those concepts being sort of definitional and roughly objective come together to form this risk assessment.

This risk matrix is sort of the initial raw cut of about 700,000 observations in the data.

We did pick a three-year period of time, which is the same period of time that Nick Jr. evaluated.

And this period of operations is roughly normal.

By that, I mean this is the complete years 2017, 2018, and 2019, considering dispatched calls only, so not the calls that are generated by police themselves, but actually requests for police service, and done during a period of relatively normal staffing and operations.

So between the pandemic and some of the staffing considerations, that the city has been grappling with for the past couple of years.

I wouldn't say necessarily that it's a good idea to make a whole lot of significant decisions based on operational patterns observed during the past couple of years.

But as we return to baseline, I think we can assume that some of the broad patterns observed from these complete, again, relatively normal or standard years of operation can be used to forecast forward what operations might look like.

You'll notice in this risk matrix, as it's populated, those definitions of severity along the top there, representing the columns and likelihood, as we discussed, converge to classify the various call types, the 356 call types.

into their respective response tiers.

Those response tiers are sort of a reasonable approach to what the organization is willing to accept.

And this is the original unmitigated risk assessment.

So this is the way operations are, and it's reflective of that, again, all hazards responder type operation.

One of the things that I would like to point out here that's an interesting observation at this point is the relative polarization of this risk assessment matrix.

I think apart from industries that really work to stay out of that red area of operation, commercial aviation obviously is what this is based on.

And if a particular operation in commercial aviation is deemed High risk, generally speaking, that operation doesn't go forward.

And there is a policy to mitigate it to a lower risk here, the yellow or the orange or the green in the middle.

Because we don't really have the option in police service, particularly when it comes to crimes in progress and active threats to persons in the environment, we don't necessarily have the option.

just not respond to those very high risk events, but as I'll discuss in the future, there is significant and the next slide here there's significant opportunity in the center of this matrix to be able to mitigate some of those things that are generally considered to be high risk.

for any other type of responder down to that right size response type of service where you can provide a resource that has the specific skills and abilities to support that person or that that function and and do so without subjecting them to undue risk of harm.

So there was, and we've discussed this a little bit, the reclassification of call types.

Just about 56% of the call types, the 356 call types that were considered by the risk-managed demand analysis here are there, are presented here in their raw result.

So they are the call classification as depicted in that call response tier, just as they come out of the calculation.

Just about 30%, just a little, almost 31% of these were actually upgraded.

These were situations where either for administrative reasons, the call type itself specifically prescribed a police officer, and you'll notice we've gone to some lengths to make sure that we're including those administrative call types so that you can, for internal consistency reasons, so that you can see the whole of what is being considered by the risk-managed demand analysis.

Included those in the spreadsheet.

So as you read through the spreadsheet, you'll see that there are things very kind of administrative type things.

officers checking out to the range or specific requests for police officers from SFD.

Those obviously are calculated as a very low risk.

We wouldn't expect those highly severe outcomes to be associated with those types of requests for service, but they are nonetheless a specific request for a police officer.

And so they were actually upgraded from their original calculated value to that tier one police only value.

In some cases, the risk managed demand calculation is actually responding to that highly managed risk environment that all hazards response that has done a fairly decent job of mitigating the risk to responders in that environment.

And so the high risk outcomes associated with specific types of enforcement are not actually realized.

So while Theoretically, a particular crime in progress may be high risk and require enforcement action.

Because it's been responded to by an all hazards responder, the severity and likelihood actually classify that a little bit lower.

But because it's a specific request for enforcement, or it might be one of those statutory requirements for a police officer, It was actually adjusted up and that occurred again about 30.6% of the time.

In previous briefings that we've had on the development of this model, in conversations with SPD in seeking funding for this model, we have always heard about risk, likelihood, and severity as being, and you just said it again, and it's mentioned a few times throughout the report, a focus on risk to responders.

But it's not clear to me that risk to responders is the risk that you analyzed in the RMD.

It seems like the input is risk to the subject.

That's a wonderful point.

And thank you for bringing that up.

So this is a proxy measure of the relative risk to people associated with that event.

Currently, it doesn't consider risk to responders.

And by that I mean, police use of force in particular so instances where the fact of a police response may have resulted in the injury to somebody.

have actually been removed from the analysis in that calculation of likelihood.

So that percentage calculation, we don't consider those situations where the specific response by a police officer actually resulted in injury either to the police officer or one of the people associated with that response, one of the community members.

So this is a proxy measure.

It does indicate sort of the approximate risk to responders or people associated with that event.

But not direct response, not directly to responders as.

begin to sort of deploy alternate response, response resources to this body of work, the actual calculation and the risk managed demand framework will begin to reflect risk to actual responders.

Unfortunately, you know, at this at this stage, because we have been operating under that all hazards response model, it just simply isn't data that's available.

So it is a proxy measure, but thank you for that.

I'm going to turn it over to of the term proxy, it seems like a completely different analytical exercise to me, whether or not you're analyzing the risk to the responder, as I thought this exercise was going to do, and which this report on a number of instances refers to the need to mitigate the risk to the responder by a co-response on page six, the potential harm to the responder on page seven.

So, I appreciate that you're characterizing the risk to the subject as a proxy for the risk to the responder.

I'm going to need to spend some more time with you to understand that.

Dan Eder, Mr. Eder.

Thank you.

So, my understanding of the data, and Lauren, please just absolutely correct me if I have this off kilter.

But my understanding is that what data was available is, if, for instance, an ambulance was called, it doesn't say who, who rode in the ambulance, it could have been one of the first responders, or it could have been the person who made the 911 call, or it could have been, you know, a bystander who wasn't purposefully involved in any way, but was in the immediate vicinity.

If within a certain number of feet from the location where the call, the incident was reported within a certain number of seconds or minutes of the response itself, there was an ambulance that took someone or treated someone, that was the signal that someone had been injured gravely or otherwise.

That's correct.

I understand that.

I just don't understand.

I thought this exercise was about risk to the responder.

I understand how you're deriving the risk to the subject, but I don't understand how one can be a proxy for the other.

They seem to me like they would be completely different analytical exercises.

Council Member Esqueda.

Thank you, Madam Chair, for lifting up those questions.

I agree with you.

I would like to better understand what the exercise is here.

I think that I just want to make sure I understand what the answer was to the last question.

In part, I believe, Lauren, you may have said that the analysis does not look at the risk to the subject, person, client, resident.

if an officer had not responded.

And that's the thing that I think is the most concerning piece that I want to know.

If an officer had not responded, it might not be that somebody ended up stabbed on the, or might end up being that somebody did not get shot down at the pier or that Charlena Lyles would have been alive.

Like these are the things that I think an analysis should look at.

to see if the near presence of an officer and any concern or fear that either instills in community or the real experience of having lethal force brought out because of that officer has lethal force as an option.

That should be what we're looking at.

Is that not the direct analysis that we're trying to get out here?

Those events are controlled in this case.

So they are not considered a part of the likelihood calculation.

And so in the cases where an officer responded and that response did result in an injury to somebody associated with that event, it's not considered in the calculation.

So this is like a lot of things in research where you can't measure the thing directly.

This is as close to the energy or the risk of that event as we can measure.

Madam Chair, if I might, I mean, thank you, Madam Chair.

Well, when we look at indicators I think it is important for us to remember that initially this analysis that we all had collectively said we wanted to get from the Nick junior report.

was something that SPD had signed off on in terms of methodology before the analysis began.

And it was only after the results of the Nick Jr. results came out that it was then called, quote, oversimplistic, and then, quote, irresponsible.

And so for context, if we're trying to grapple with where we can best utilize existing data and then make some proxy analyses for how to move forward.

I think that we should continue to look at the Nick Jr. report that showed that 49% of SPD calls should receive community-based responses for non-police presence and another 24 should receive community-based responses with an officer alongside to just be merely present.

If we're still in the place of questioning whether or not we have the perfect data, it sounds like we'll never have the perfect data.

For us to be able to look at the three years worth of results that Nick Jr. also looked at, seems incredibly important.

I don't see that there's a strong analysis that's saying that this approach is better than the Nick Jr. approach.

To me, the findings from Nick Jr. are still just as sound given the complications with the data that you just mentioned.

CEO Maxey?

I just want to make clear the reason that the use of force data cannot be entered into this calculation is if we judge the risk of a response based on whether or not an officer used force, we would be bootstrapping and a lot of these calls that we've identified as amenable for tier four, tier three, tier two of either a co-response or complete diversion.

Again, this doesn't, These are the end call types, this doesn't make it absolute, but what we've done is we've put the risk of injury behind the Nick Jr. data.

If you include use of force, then we are skewing the data in favor of a police response because force was used and injury caused.

That's the variable we are trying to get at, so you have to pull that out in order to control all of the other variables.

I don't know if that made it any more clear, but if we drop use of force back into this, you will see many, many more calls going up to tier one, which is not, I think, where we want to be.

Thank you for that explanation.

Council Member Lewis.

I'll turn it over to you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you so much, Chair Herbold.

Sort of in a similar vein to Councilmember Mosqueda's question, I want to break down the practical applications for this report and maybe get some clarifications about how this information will be able to guide the the report and maybe giving additional guidance to the executive on how we might proceed in partnership.

So I want to direct attention to the panel to page 8 on the report where there's sort of the Rothko chart of the boxes indicating the distribution of the calls.

And there's helpful descriptions of the general character of the different boxes.

I have a couple of questions for you.

and the police responders in separate vehicles are dispatched to some incident separately.

I'm not sure if that's a good way to put it.

I'm not sure if that's a good way to put it.

I'm not sure if that's a good way to put it.

I'm not sure if that's a good way to put it.

I'm not sure if that's a good way to put it.

I'm not sure if that's a good way to put it.

I'm not sure if that's a good way to put it.

I'm not sure if that's a good way to put it.

Ron Papsdorf, DRCOG): No, no, that is correct, and I want to be careful not to solution to solution this particular analysis, that is, that is obviously the purview of the workgroup.

Ron Papsdorf, DRCOG): But the framework, the tiered response framework that was proposed by Nick junior and actually carried forward into this analysis.

Ron Papsdorf, DRCOG): Apart from the fact that the tears themselves are reverse coded to reflect the type of.

or sort of the fashion that call prioritization is typically applied in PSAP operations.

Your characterization of what that tier three response looks like is in fact correct.

So if that's the case, one thing I'm sort of curious about is imposing this analysis we've done on the models that are thriving and successful in other jurisdictions and whether we are being I would say that we have been more cautious in the attribution of risk assessment than those other jurisdictions have been.

In terms of practically science advances peer-reviewed study on STAR from June, which I'm going to cite from.

If not, I can send to offices.

I think it's a helpful primer on some of the early results from the STAR pilot in Denver.

But in their description and scoping of what STAR would respond to, they give a fairly broad public health mandate to the program.

to respond, and I'm quoting from page two of the study, a program in Denver provides a mobile crisis response for community members experiencing problems related to mental health, depression, poverty, homelessness, and or substance abuse issues.

The STAR response consists of two healthcare staff, who provide rapid onsite support to individuals in crisis and direct them to further appropriate care, including requesting police involvement if necessary.

My read of that is that describes something that we would probably characterize as a tier three or four under this analysis, but some of those call types might be in what you're anticipating a co-response for.

And I wonder if that would be the practical implication, and if so, why dual dispatch and pure civilian response would be inappropriate for some of the things Denver is showing they can be used for.

Chair Herbold, may I address that?

Absolutely.

And we've only got a couple minutes left here.

I did commit to adjourning this meeting at 1130.

Thank you, and I do want to make sure that SPD gets to the end of their presentation, so I'll be brief.

Council Member Lewis, I think that those are very interesting questions that this research really can't answer and doesn't try to.

This research is attempting merely to look at how a risk analysis would suggest We diversify the response of 911 calls beyond exclusive response by police officers.

It does not attempt to do program design.

It doesn't say that the risk analysis is determinative of the most appropriate kind of program to design or call types to assign to any new program.

All right, let's move on.

I want to just flag, we don't need to go over the tier structure again, which I see is the next slide.

We did get a thorough briefing on the model a few months ago.

So let's skip that one and move forward.

Okay.

Just real quickly, the capacity forecast here, these two pie charts show the distribution of both service hours on the right-hand side and call pipes on the left-hand side, and the way that they break out between the call response tiers.

So I would just like to highlight in the interest of brevity here, there is significant opportunity for a safe diversification of response for some innovation, much along the lines as you may already have in mind.

Just as a quick preview of what some of those tier four type responses look like.

These are the tier four call types.

You'll notice there are some things in here that might strike you as sort of strictly police type responses.

The tier four doesn't necessarily mean that a police officer isn't required.

It just doesn't necessarily mean that a patrol response is required.

And there is significant opportunity for both efficiencies as well as a diversification of response in that tier four call type.

covering some of the considerations real quick and mindful of time here.

There are two recommendations in the report for desiloing and cleaning up the call types.

One of the things that makes this analysis a little bit difficult and requires some of that forced recoding is, in fact, just sort of a massive amount of call type classifications that exist.

RMD analysis doesn't limit the amount of call types or the way that those call types are handled.

That still serves a PSAP operation function, and we're working closely with CSCC through our data governance program to assist in that process.

This does manage some of that feedback so I just want to highlight that the outcomes that are noted here for the definition of severity are independent of the police response they are not the result of the police response, and they don't actually come from police data.

So some of the limitations that have been discussed, or.

Speculated related to injuries related to the police response itself are not actually considered by this analysis.

This doesn't limit the way that the PSAP currently conducts operations for in progress and just occurred type operations.

It's not rigid enough that it would force the dispatchers to do something that wouldn't otherwise be their standard practice when the call taker themselves understands that there is immediate life health safety risk.

or a crime in progress that can be interdicted.

And also, there is concern about the use of police data in compounding disparity.

I just want to highlight that this particular piece of analysis is not used to direct crime control strategies.

And so that risk of compounding disparity and generating more data that are then used to generate more crime control treatment areas doesn't exist in this particular analysis.

Just some next steps.

The next couple of months have us building the infrastructure to operationalize this and working with our partners at CSCC to field test and continue to calibrate the model in a continuous improvement fashion.

And also, I know that there's some interest in the quality assurance work that we have contracted with the Council of State Governments.

That's currently in progress, and they are checking over our methods and our work independently.

And that's pretty much it.

Thank you, Lauren.

Much appreciated.

I see that Councilmember Mosqueda has a question, and perhaps Councilmember Lewis has another question.

His hand's still up, but maybe that's an old question.

That's an old hand.

I'm willing to waive it per time.

Thank you.

Before I allow Councilmember Mosqueda the last question, I see Councilmember Nelson's got her hand up, too.

All right, well, we're agreeing to we're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to work together.

We're going to continue to the model pumped out sort of outcomes that were reversed about 50 percent of the time.

And you mentioned, COO Maxey, that judgment calls were made, but we don't understand what policies principles or rules were used to guide the decision.

So if we're going to recognize that this model has limitations, but that it's a better model than as Council Member Mosqueda was saying before, then if we're going to continue to argue that it's a better model and more predictive than the Nick Jr. report, then I think when we are having human beings come in and reverse the outputs of the model, we really need to understand how those decisions are being made to do the best we can to limit the impacts of judgment and make sure that those decisions, if made by judgment, are made by judgments based on an agreement around policies and principles.

So just putting that out there for future discussion.

Councilmember Mosqueda?

I'm not seeing Councilmember Mosqueda on the screen.

Oh, there she is.

So sorry.

Madam Chair, your last comment is exactly the point that I was going to get across as well.

I'm still not convinced that an SPD-driven analysis is not going to already inherently include the internal biases, the racial bias that we see, and thus why we continue to be under a consent decree.

So I very much hope that this will be on the agenda again when you can, Madam Chair.

I'm concerned that it sounds like this model is being deployed or implemented.

I'm still, maybe I'll follow up to make sure that I fully understand what the next steps are that you just articulated.

And then in response to Council Member Lewis's question, the answer was this is not intended to give us a blueprint or a policy direction and change, but the Nick Jr report did again the Nick Jr report told us 45% 49% of the time, we won't need an officer, it should be handled.

by folks who are not tied to SPD.

And it said that 24% of the time, a community-based response along with SPD officer to merely be present was appropriate.

So if Nick Jr. is giving us that level of specific next steps for policy changes, I don't understand why we continue to look at another report that doesn't give us the level of policy suggestions here.

So look forward to following up Madam Chair with you and the team here next time we have this conversation.

Thank you, customer Nelson.

Thank you.

I don't want to take up a lot of time but I do want to note that we have been calling for this for a long time and there is some time sensitivity and getting this information we didn't have to talk about deactivation today so I, you know, This is not to be hurried.

So we asked for this body of work.

So why did we ask for this body of work if we already had the Nick Jr.?

I believe that this is a fruitful line of work.

This is an analysis that is first of its kind, looking at a multidimensional layered risk.

And it will inform what we do going forward.

I have questions about the Denver Star approach, because according to this memo on page, well, on the first page, it says it responds to assist intoxicated persons.

Those are really low-level calls.

And so we're talking about co-responses perhaps.

And we also already do have a body, the mobile crisis units go out, not mobile crisis, but the officers that go with social workers already.

So one of my questions for follow-up would be, are we talking about just maybe expanding on that when we're talking about the co-response?

But mostly, I just want to say thank you for this work, and I look forward to diving into it later.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I just want to clarify.

We did pass a slide.

The slide did not specifically say go analyze the Nick Jr. report and do a different analysis on it.

So the slide itself was not specifically for the risk management demand, the risk management demand was something that the department was seeking to do.

And we had some, the council at the time had some strong feelings about whether or not the risk management demand was necessary, because we did have the Nick Jr. report.

And so we did request a statement of legislative intent once we knew that the department was going to be doing this work, we did agree to fund it.

And I think it's, you know, again, it's an indicator of our willingness to collaborate in areas that the department is excited about moving into.

But we've asked for this report so that before we move into future phases, we have some agreement about how the prior phases were done.

And, you know, again, particularly as it relates to, you know, reversing the outcomes of the model, I think we want to have some policies and procedures in place for how and when that's appropriate before we move on again to the next phases of this work.

COO Maxey.

I just, I just want to emphasize we did not reverse the findings of the model we presented that we also took the next step which is, here's the analysis, putting on a risk management lens, how does this fall in reality, the, the Some of the calls, you know, you struggle with it.

For example, bomb threat.

Bomb threat by the model is a tier four.

No one has ever gotten hurt responding to a bomb threat.

We've left that as a tier four, I think in the analysis, is that where that should properly lie?

That is an open question.

I think I mentioned welfare check earlier.

There was a welfare check that resulted in a death.

Presumably they found a dead person and that garnered the response, but that doesn't actually dictate whether it's safe, a good proxy as to whether that's safe for the responder.

So certainly there were some internal discussions that were made and we put this out as our proposal.

All of those are subject to discussion.

If there are particular calls you're interested in, we can do a deep dive in it.

Again, we have shown our work on everything.

There's nothing that has not been transparent here.

I'm sorry if the use of the word reverse is not the proper word.

It certainly does not suggest that you did not do anything transparently.

I see the terms that you are using are upgrading and downgrading, so I will endeavor to use those terms.

Thank you so much.

All right.

It is 1141 a.m.

There are no further questions or comments.

This is, again, another step in the process.

It is, I just want to say, I don't know that this particular body of work is time sensitive to the development of the pilot.

And so this is going to be a long-term body of work, and we probably, based on the executive's statements, we are probably not going to see staffing proposals based on the model, the response model, until late 2023, probably going to be funded in the late 2023 budget discussions for 2024. So this is one necessary step, but not time sensitive, but really wanted to have this discussion.

Well, I sure hope that it does inform our model of how we respond, our alternative response.

I'm happy to talk to you more offline, Council Member Nelson, but the difference is the pilot that we're looking at developing is going to identify a couple of low-level call types, as mentioned in this report, and divert those call types and have a pilot to divert those call types.

This is a diversified analysis across all call types that might result in non-police responses or co-responses across many, many call types.

And so the report does identify some things that they are identifying and calling as low-risk, low-likelihood tiers.

And those might be, in fact, some of the tiers that we're looking at.

The term sheet that we discussed at length at the last committee meeting talked about person down and wellness checks.

So hopefully that's a good preview of things to come on both bodies of work moving forward on parallel tracks and with the hope that one is more short-term than the other.

But really still very excited about this long-term comprehensive look at the data and appreciate that you're breaking ground and that this is work that no other jurisdiction in the country has tried.

So thank you.

With that, it is 11.44 a.m., and there are no further comments.

The meeting will be adjourned.

We will not have another committee meeting until December 13th, 2022. Thank you.